Thank you so much, Peter, for your warm welcome and very helpful information.
I live on a houseboat just up above Newhaven Harbour and the Sinbad that I now have taken care of was left on the mooring by a gentleman who had lived on it at the mooring for three or so years but had to go back to his native Romania. The mooring owner impounded the boat for lack of mooring fees and was threatening to break it up. I gave him £400 to prevent that and now am trying to reinstate it into usable condition. The boat is called the 'Mutiny', but I don't know how to find an identification mark.
My son and I have put in a lot of elbow grease and enthusiasm but have no knowledge of small boats or sailing. But we are excited to learn. We paid quite a sum to get the rigging fixed (or so we thought!), to have the keel mechanism and tiller overhauled and functional and we have painted and cleaned generally. However, when we decided to test it out this weekend, the forestay snapped (as we now realise, because the mechanism was almost ceased up and had not been greased). So now we have taken the whole mast down, taken out the furler and are trying to get the cable out of the sleeve. This is proving very difficult, because the sleeve appears to have been put together with contact adhesive, or 'No Nails', making it very tough to get it apart, so we can't get to the fixed end of the cable inside. I shall try to apply a flame gun to the 'No Nails' next weekend and see if I can deconstruct the furler into its component parts. It seems to be the difference between £60 for a new cable cut to size and £600 for a complete new furler!
But the beauty of this process is that, the more we take things apart, the more we learn and the more invested we become in getting the 'Mutiny' into top-notch form and sailing her as she was meant to be sailed!
Thank you again for your welcome into this elite community. It means a lot to know that there is a group of people devoted to maintaining a place for this excellent little craft.
Kind regards.
Vic and Adam Thorpe
PS: We have joined the PSSA now Thank you